


Snow White and the Huntsman

by storyqdayx5d



Category: Snow White and the Huntsman (2012), Snow White – All Media Types
Genre: Dark Character, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-07-03
Updated: 2012-10-03
Packaged: 2017-11-09 02:00:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 13,988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/450006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/storyqdayx5d/pseuds/storyqdayx5d
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You will give the queen your heart, and you will return to me.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Snow White and the Huntsman

**Author's Note:**

> This doesn't operate too strictly within the world of Snow White and the Huntsman (2012) since I only saw it once. But since I'm giving a shout out to the Grimm's brothers (hi, boys!) and other various retellings of the tale, I figured I might as well mention the movie, too.
> 
> I suppose you could consider it an AU.
> 
> This whole piece was inspired by the line "there is no space for/frost" from the poem ["Can't Keep Disguise in White"](http://joshuarobertlong.com/post/26038438045/cant-keep-disguise-in-white-from-harpoon) by Joshua Robert Long which I read directly after seeing [this picture.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m68mpxwGYf1qz6f9yo1_1280.jpg)

Would you die for me? she asked.

She lay mostly on her back with the curve of her ass to him. She was trying to present herself as a picture of opulence, but she was thin, and pale, her hip bones jutting out visibly, distracting. Her breasts were small, their nipples grey. Her hair was dark, her eyebrows painted on her forehead, first one, then the other, blown dry with the gentlest of breaths. Her lips were red. All enchanted princesses had red lips, red like apples, like poison, sleeping lips and singing lips and waking lips and lips that were stiff (the top one) while their bearers were scrubbing their hands raw on some wicked stepmother’s marble floor, lips that trembled (the bottom one) at a clap of thunder in the distance, lips that did not chap in winter, that did not burn in the sun’s high heat, that did not burn, even, when pressed against other lips, unless they were the lips of a prince. Then they burned enough to break spells.

Most princesses who had tales to their name were sweet, pure, demure. The charmed animals to help with their chores – blue birds to do the washing, the folding, mice to help darn socks, squirrels to dust – but this one had no such friends. She was strange and silent and dangerous, and the forest creatures regarded her as a predator. With her eyes on him rolling up like that, bewitching, her gaze seemed almost a palpable thing on the air, made of the stuff that freezes deer in their tracks. The huntsman was inclined to agree. He had come for her heart and felt that she had instead gathered his.

She carried white carnations. If he could have looked away from her, if he could have moved, he might have barked a laugh at this: this young princess, lying naked in the middle of the forest at the feet of a huntsman, her eyes as dark as the space between a woman’s thighs, carrying the pure white flowers of a country maid on her wedding day.

The huntsman could not kill her. He would have, maybe, if she had remained clothed, but the girl did not grow up in an evil queen’s palace for nothing. Even trapped under the earth in the castle's dungeons, the rumors had reached her: rumors of how the old king died  _the queen seduced him, bewitched him, had showed him a flawless shining face, golden, had unraveled her silver hair, had smiled with lips that were pomegranate red and had drawn him down into death and her bed._

He could see the ridges of her spine and imagined scales erupting there, green scales like smoke in a burning forest. He tried imagine what she would sound like if she roared. She lay on the floor and looked up at him, her face almost upside down, her dark lashes framing her eyes. She did not need to sing or to beckon.

Would you die for me?

It was a challenge. He wanted to laugh, to scoff, to draw his blade and claim,  _I came here to kill you, girl_ ,  _to cut out your heart_. He wanted to tell her that perhaps he would keep her around first, a plaything, a maid, or else he would keep her heart for himself and eat it, queen be damned. But he couldn’t.  _Would you die for me_ , she asked, and she knew that he was hers and that she need not fear any threat from him. She mocked him, her nude body writhing on a floor, a pale serpent and he a hapless, ensnared, snake charmer.

[There is no space for frost](http://joshuarobertlong.com/post/26038438045/cant-keep-disguise-in-white-from-harpoon), here, she said. No space for lukewarm promises, for dithering.

He feared her, suddenly, more than he feared the queen, who was simple in her desire – to be the fairest one of all, to remain unchallenged. This princess with her thin body, her dark hair, her skin that could either be cold to the touch or raging, that was turning blue in the twilight although she did not shiver, did not so much as blink. If she merely wanted to  _live_ , that was a simple thing, if messy. But this girl, around whom death and power crackled - the huntsman was certain she wanted more than that.

“Why should I die for you?” he asked finally.

She smiled and sat up, the flowers falling forgotten on the ground. The huntsman was certain that he’d just made a grave mistake but he stood his ground as she walked toward him. The shadows seemed to curl around her like concerned, caressing hands, but the moon broke through the trees above her and she was lit from above, the center of her body from forehead to toes one bright soft stripe of pale flesh. He raised the knife the queen had given him and the girl, this mad witch girl, smiled. She did not take it from him, but she grasped his wrist and brought the knife across her chest, her eyes widening as it slid in, deep. She cut a line across the top of her heart. He felt her sticky blood on his fingers and she pulled him down and kissed him and her lips were green apples, were poison and pomegranate seeds, and there was heat, and ice, and when she pulled away he was no longer himself, he was hers.

“What –“

Don’t speak, huntsman, she said. Her eyes were even darker, her gaze steady as if she had not just mortally wounded herself. Perhaps she hadn’t.

She took the knife from him now; he released it willingly. She held it between her teeth, her own blood on her lips, and unlaced his tunic and bared his chest, dark and wide and covered with hair, to the forest. The birds seemed to screech a warning, crawling things slithered across the forest floor, away, away, to hide from this naked mad girl, her eyes like the darkest, farthest speck of sky, cold and hateful.

Whether you would or not, huntsman, she mused, and he realized, for the first time, that she did not need to open her mouth to speak, you will die.

You will give the queen your heart, and you will return to me.


	2. The Wicked Queen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If she had known, she would have found a way to stop it; perhaps she would have killed him sooner.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "The Grimms describe one version of 'Snow White' in which a count and countess drive by three mounds of snow and the count wishes for a girl as white as the snow. After passing three ditches filled with red blood, he wishes for a girl with cheeks as red as the blood. Finally, three ravens fly overhead and he wishes for a girl with hair as black as the ravens. The couple discovered on the road a girl exactly like the one the count longs for, and they invite her into their carriage."  
> -Maria Tatar, "The Annotated Brothers Grimm"

He went driving with the witch-queen one day, before she had made her powers known. She still smelled like salt and sea grass and she hated to ride out in the winter, but he had bidden her, and so she went. It was she who had made Snow’s creation possible, the magic she had brought with her, but she didn’t know it. She owed him her dowry, and with no male relatives to give her away, she had offered him the only thing she could think of: she would grant him a single wish.

“You are all I could wish for,” he said gallantly. “Your hand in marriage.”

She believed him, but it was a lie, and the wish she would have granted was saved: he would use it another day, in the middle of a long and terrible winter.

If she had known, she would have found a way to stop it; perhaps she would have killed him sooner.

They had driven out and he had seen three hills of snow, all the same size, perfectly rounded and white amidst the ravaged, hungry country, a welcome contrast against the plumes of smoke in the distance; his people starving and hungry and cold. He had seen the snow and pointed and the queen smiled thinly at him.

“If we were ever to have a child, dearest, I would like her to have skin like that – see how the snow glows, how bright it is, how pure and beautiful.”

The queen did not answer. They drove on.

They came to a place in the road next to three uncovered ditches. The bodies of men, women, and children – victims of a plague, of the cold, of hunger, or a combination of the three – lay atop each other, their blood thick and congealed, dark as ripe cherries against the snow which lined their open graves. The king was a frivolous man, and the bodies of his subjects meant nothing to him. He looked at them distastefully. The queen’s lips tightened. In her realm by the sea, even the poorest could fish to keep themselves fed, and it was never this cold. Children did not lie out on the ground there, their eyes staring up at the grey winter sky, the frigid air the only thing keeping the flies at bay. Even the orphans wore shirts if not shoes and played out by the sea, and if they were skinny they at least were alive, and if hungry, they still danced, sometimes, in the surf.

“At least the cold keeps the stench away,” the queen said, her voice tight and angry. The king mistook her tone for one of derision and he laughed, cruelly. She wondered how he could have fooled her, how he could have charmed her from her precious tower by the sea. It made her heart ache, but she clenched her jaw and tilted her chin up and looked down her nose at the poor children, begging forgiveness from them but arranging her face into one of cool detachment nonetheless. He had had the bigger army; he would have slaughtered all her people if she had not gone with him. She may not have been the wisest queen, but she had saved them from that.

“Look at the blood, though,” the king said. “How beautiful the red is on the snow! If we ever have a daughter, my love, I would like her to have lips as lush, and dark, and red. Lusty as a peasant’s blood in her fine porcelain face.”

The queen shuddered. He looked at her sharply, and she leaned against him, pressing her face into the bear fur of his coat. It smelled rotten, like a kill three days old in August. She swallowed hard and burrowed closer and forced herself to agree with him: how lovely it would be to have a daughter with lips as red as blood.

They continued on, the queen standing as close to the king as she could bear. It seemed to get colder the closer she was to him, and she thought of how long her life would be with this man. She longed for her tower, for the winding steps she climbed up and down to tend her garden each day. She grew herbs – thyme and rosemary, dill, oregano – she dried them and used them in stews and in bread; this she preferred even to spell-casting. And she missed her orchards terribly, the red apples and the green, the golden apples that she carved into intricate flowers, into butterflies, into birds, and drizzled with honey and fed to the children who capered in front of her gate. She missed the berry patch that lay just outside the confines of her orchards that the grandmothers tended, blueberries and raspberries and blackberries all baked into pies, the best of which was always presented to her late in the summer. They would be overgrown, now, the orchards and the berry patch, or plundered; there was no one left to tend to them, and she didn’t blame the people for taking what they could. She thought perhaps her tiny kingdom could sustain itself for a while, but it was her magic that kept the weather temperate, that kept the rain on schedule, that forestalled the droughts that plagued so many other places. And now she was here in this dying land, with a king who laughed at the corpses of his subjects, who saw the faces of his future children in their frozen blood.

Three ravens flew overhead and the king jerked his arm up, dislodging her ungracefully from his shoulder. She wiped carefully at her eyes; it wouldn’t do to let him see her cry. But her face was dry. She was as cold and remote as the winter, not even the memory of the harvest in her summer-city could thaw her now.

“Look, dearest!” the king cried, pointing at the carrion-birds and clapping like a child. The queen was repulsed, but she hid her revulsion easily. “How dark their feathers, how glossy and shiny! If we are ever to have a daughter, I would wish for her hair to be as dark as a raven’s wing.”

He looked at the queen expectantly, but she was watching the sky and the interweaving of the birds as they raced to the ditches where the children lay and pecked viciously at each other. She turned to him, her face still as a frozen pond. She had been so far from the sea for so long, her face was as pale as the snow-skin of the daughter he sought, her hair the color of the flight feathers of doves, her eyes the dark green of a burning forest, or of the sea.

“She would be lovely, my husband,” the queen acquiesced. “She would be the fairest one of all.”

 


	3. The Death of the Huntsman

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He would rise, he would bring his heart to the queen and call it hers, and he would return. He had no choice in the matter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by [this drawing](http://ohgross.tumblr.com/post/26324364321/ha-ha-sorry-i-totally-forgot-i-have-this-blog).

She thought of death as she watched the huntsman die. His blood spilled on the forest floor, black and thick as oil, shining silver where the moonlight hit it. The huntsman was pale now, almost as pale as she was, and his eyes were open. He glared at her. He would rise, he would bring his heart to the queen and call it hers, and he would return. He had no choice in the matter.

She thought about how death came for the king, the one who was purportedly her father, like a bouquet of black flowers, like smoke, dark as the color of his daughter’s hair. She did not mourn him. He had collected her the way he collected all beautiful things, like the way he had collected the queen from her realm by the sea, from her ocean-battered tower. He had cultivated her, the girl they called Snow, like the flowers in his own garden, or rather, he had ordered someone else to do so, to care for the red roses with vicious thorns, to care of the pale girl with red roses in her cheeks and biting teeth and tantrums that echoed throughout the halls. He rarely bothered with her, except to watch her greedily, her pale skin, her blood lips, her hair like the birds that had picked his bones clean.

She had not been born in the usual way, and the queen had made sure she knew that. She had been collected from the things her father had seen and deemed beautiful. A pile of snow, blood on the dirt, the feathers of a carrion bird. The queen had owed her father a wish, and Snow was what he had been granted. The queen hated and feared her the way she hated and feared the king. She killed him and locked Snow in the dungeons below. Her bed was made of loose straw and insects that stung and bit. She was given a blanket with holes, and no fire nor even a candle. It was always winter in that kingdom – the queen had vowed to keep it that way after she murdered the king and seized the realm for herself, but even after the king was dead, winter lingered. The queen did not return to her summer lands; she grew pale and grey like marble and gathered her magic around her and became beautiful and hard as stone. She claimed the tower for herself and kept a garden with her magic, where she grew her herbs and her apples – no golden apples anymore, however, only red, like blood, like poison. She hoped that Snow would die in the dungeon, but of course, Snow wouldn’t. You can’t kill a girl made of snow and blood with cold.

The people learned to hate the queen. Many left. Those that remained lived off of mud and ashes. They made soups of tree bark and stunted potatoes and hunted the starving creatures in the straggling, blackened wood. The land was grey and brown and bore no fruit, no corn, no herbs - there were barely even any weeds to eat! And though the queen could have called upon Spring-time and granted them a reprieve from the cold, she did not. And though she could have shared with them the harvest from her garden, she did not. Instead her apples shone brighter, their skin a uniform hue that reflected light like the edge of a knife, and she ate them, and grew harder and more like marble until if she stood very still, she could almost be confused for a statue. The people whispered that she watered the garden with her own heart’s blood. They hated her, and mourned their king, forgetting how he laughed over the bodies of their starved children, how he had declared the blood against the snow and their dead pale skin to be  _beautiful_  and claimed the color for his daughter’s lips.

They shouted for Snow to be released, to be crowned their rightful queen. They whispered to each other revised versions of her history so that the queen was not her mother but a hateful interloper; they invented a wise and lovely queen who had reigned when the forest was still alive, an autumn queen, a harvest queen, a queen of evergreen and acorn, of rabbits and does and stags and wild boar. The winter queen ordered a great fire to be built in the hall and invited all the people to stay there, but still she did not give them food, and she didn’t come down from her tower, and they called her ugly names. They visited Snow in the dungeon and brought her meals, which were nothing more than bowls of hot water, more often than not. They gave her candle sticks and asked to touch her hair and one night a little girl slipped a pin into Snow’s cell. Snow picked the lock and vanished into the forest, and the people cheered, and the queen brought down a thunderstorm, and hail, and ice, but she did not banish the people from the hall and she kept the fires roaring. She called the huntsman to her. She told him to find Snow White and to bring him back her heart, and once she was certain that every trace of the dead king was gone from the land, she would restore to the realm springtime, and sunlight, clean fields, forests populated with game, and a chance for full bellies once more.

Now the huntsman was dead, the glare on his face vacant and unmoving. Snow regretted, momentarily, the pain he must have suffered, but his heart was now warm in her hand. While she had been waiting for him to die, she had fashioned a needle from bone (in the dungeon she had taken to eating rats raw and she kept their bones, which were often useful). She stitched closed his now empty chest and closed his eyes for him, placing over them flat stones. She stripped off his shirt with some difficulty – he was much larger than her, and heavy. She washed his shirt in the cold water of a stream until there was no trace of blood and wrung out the water as best she could. She put her own ragged clothes back on, unconcerned for her bare arms and feet. She built a small fire to help dry the huntsman’s shirt, and when it was only a little damp, she dressed him in it and removed the stones from his eyes. She kissed his eyelids and his lips and he sat up, cold and blue in the dawn. She tore a swatch from her skirt and wrapped his heart in it; she handed it to him.

Bring this to my mother the queen, she bade him. Tell her I am dead and she can cease her hunt. Then return to me.

 

 


	4. The Huntsman's Wife

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She was a hearty, daring girl; she was a girl who was supposed to have survived the winter.
> 
> She didn't.

The huntsman was not susceptible to the stories that the people told to comfort themselves. He remembered the truest version of events: the dead king who laughed in the faces of grieving widows, of mothers whose children had died of cold and of starvation, of fathers who raised their axes and pitchforks to the walls of the king’s castle only to be cut down and thrown into shallow graves. He did not raise a weapon when his Penny died, although now he wished he had – for he would have been sent quickly to join her. Her death had stunned him; she was his sturdy girl, her dark hair thick and curly, her face round and red and laughing even in the thinnest, cruelest cold, her large arms swinging her hammer tirelessly at the forge. She was always the very picture of health, so when she died, it hit the huntsman hard and left him motionless for weeks and by the time he came back to himself, no one charged the castle anymore and he was alone.

He remembered the pale, foreign queen, not the evil queen the people had invented to replace her: the temptress, the witch. He remembered how she had arrived standing tall like dried summer grass, out of place against the perpetually overcast skies. There was no queen of the harvest for him to remember longingly, no gentle queen to mourn, no just king to avenge. He knew Snow White was the daughter of the dead king and the foreign queen, although there had never been any announcement of the queen’s pregnancy, no parade, no feast day on the day the girl was born. He almost knew, if he stopped long enough to think of it, that Snow White sprang from the ground and the wish of a frivolous, heartless ruler, a wish granted by an unwilling, captive wife.

He agreed to hunt the girl because he pitied the queen, and hated the king, and had nothing left to lose. He had been married for years to Penny, the blacksmith’s only daughter – a girl with broad shoulders and strong arms, with scars from wrist to elbow and splashed across her face. Her hair was the flat dark of ashes and there were wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and lips; she was a girl who laughed and brawled with men, who made axes, and horseshoes, but whose true talent was for swords. She made swords for the king’s army; ugly, uniform things that she forged half-heartedly because she despised the king's soldiers almost as much as she hated the king himself. She made swords that hung on the walls in a secret room in her shop – beautiful things, swords made for princes, and counts, swords that waited for wise and honest rulers, swords that the huntsman knew she was capable of making. She was a hearty, daring girl; she was a girl who was supposed to have survived the winter.

She didn’t.

The huntsman knew there was something strange about Snow White. How could a girl like _that_ have survived the years of winter in the cold wet of a dungeon, with hardly any food, no fire, nothing that could really be called a blanket? She seemed to have been made of the ice that gave her her name. He did not pity her the way everyone else did; he did not long to see her made queen. Her lips were the color of the blood her father had spilt, her hair the color of heart’s blood frozen, of shadows, of smoke, of the feathers of birds who feasted on dead flesh. He hated that such a slip of a girl could survive the winter when he wife had perished – his wife, with her laugh, with her roaring voice, with her broad hips and thick legs and ample backside, who clobbered him as often as she kissed him and often simultaneously. He could still remember how the veins in her neck jumped to attention when she threw her head back, whether in laughter or passion, or the way her hair spilled in knots and curls as she shook it out a night, the roughness of her blacksmith’s hands, the way she all but snarled at him when she was angry, and pressed against him roughly, hours later, when she was not.

She was dead now, the huntsman thought as he walked back to the queen, his own heart in his hand. He thought he could feel it beat, and if he had been alive, he might have trembled in fear. But he was dead, and cold, and still he was not with his Penny. He was dead and still he would never see her again. She had gone where he could not follow, thanks to Snow White; it was Snow White to whom he would return.

The huntsman had hoped when he swore to kill her, the return of spring would allow his Penny would return to him. It was a wild, foolish hope, one that he knew would never come to pass. The queen had not even thought to offer him that; perhaps, he wondered if she would have, if he’d pressed her, if he had resisted her command to bring to her her daughter's heart. But he had known it would be impossible – or if not impossible, then dreadfully ill-advised. Penny was dead. Her body was taken out with the other plague victims and covered in astringent white powder to keep the corpses from spreading disease – he could still see the stain of blood on her lips, the way her limbs had splayed as she had been thrown carelessly into the shared and shallow grave. When he had undertaken the queen's mission, he wanted what she had wanted: to destroy all evidence of the dead king in this land. That would avenge his Penny and then he could drink and die as he wished, and more comfortably in the warmth the queen would bring them.

Now even that was lost to him.

 

 

 


	5. The Huntsman's Heart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Snow White is not like any other princess. She was not born, so she cannot die. You will continue on forever by her side, without stopping, without rest. She is a spell that must be undone.”

The huntsman was pale when he returned, and the queen pitied him. He handed her a heart wrapped in a swath of the girl’s skirt and did not meet her eyes when she took it from him.

It felt wrong, somehow. The huntsman had held it in one large hand, but the queen had to carry it with two. It was heavy and still warm although the huntsman had carried it a long way, and the queen thought she could feel the tremble of its beat like an echo across the dense muscle. The huntsman watched her face and hands as she examined the heart, his expression not unlike the look that pub girls sometimes wear when their patrons are too handsy: resignation twisted his lips, his eyes were hollow and not-quite-sad-not-quite-angry and there was helplessness there which was at odds with his broad shoulders, his thick wrists, his hands and strong fingers with blood under the nails.

The queen saw him stiffen as she raised the heart to her lips and tested it against the tip of her tongue. His heart tasted of many things – of beer and sweat and animal-fear of young stags chased through the forest, of skinned and smoked rabbits and long pelts tanning in the sun, of the bitter tang of sweat that has pooled in the dip of a woman’s collarbone as she is made love to on a pile of furs in front of a roaring fire. The queen could see all these things with the heart against her teeth. She could taste longing and sorrow and heat and loss. There was no snow, no frozen blood, no feathers in this heart. It was the wrong heart. It had not belonged to Snow White. It was the huntsman’s heart.

“You didn’t kill her,” the queen said.

The huntsman didn’t move or speak.

“Follow me.”

She led him up into the tower, the winding staircase the only thing in this land reminiscent of her former home. The walls were cool and smelled like rancid meat, however, unlike the walls of her old tower, which smelled like sand and ocean. She walked quickly up, up, up, her skirts trailing behind her. The huntsman kept pace, careful not to tread on the fabric. When they reached the top of the tower she strode quickly through the heavy wooden door and into the humidity of her garden. It was the only warm place in the kingdom and the only place where things grew. The ceiling was made of glass and even though the sun was hidden, as it always was, in an overcast sky, what little light remained found its way into the garden to keep it lush and green. There were red apples hanging fat and ripe from every tree; there were black eyed susans and tiger lilies and tiny yellow roses and the ceaseless drone of bees and hummingbird wings. In the center of the garden a silver bowl had been placed atop a large flat white stone. The huntsman could hear the unmistakable sound of water running, although he couldn’t tell where it was coming from; rainwater, perhaps. Magic.

If he had been alive, he would have been trembling – magic always made his skin crawl. He preferred flint and stone, wood and fire, the crackling of animal fat on a flame, the hard plain starch of shriveled potatoes if there was nothing to hunt, or even the gnawing of an empty belly. The queen survived on the magic in the fruit she cultivated and it made the hair on his arms stand up. He despised magic, and it was all around him in this tower; he could even feel it in hollow space inside his chest. It was the only thing keeping him conscious.

This didn’t make him in any way grateful for it.

He stared at the apples and the numerous birds and if the blood had been moving through his veins it would have been hot and angry. If Penny had been able to rest in a place like this, he thought, with warmth and fruit and herbs and poultices that the queen no doubt knew how to make, perhaps she might have lived. His distrust of magic didn’t extend this far – he would have taken it to save Penny’s life. If she had lived, if the queen had saved her, he would have hunted Snow White and brought back her heart without faltering. Then, with every trace of the king banished from the land, it would have been springtime again. Perhaps he and Penny would have had children. Perhaps they would have just practiced. He would be alive and not bound to some cold enchanted girl in the forest. Penny would be alive. And if the queen changed her mind and did not lift the cold, they could have left.

The queen was watching him, his heart still in her hands. She looked sad.

“I can not bring your darling girl back,” she said. She walked over to the nearest tree and placed his heart carefully down. She began, with her hands, to dig. “I could not have even kept her from leaving, and even if I could, I wouldn’t.”

“Why?”

“Why should I?” the queen said bitterly. She picked up his heart and placed it in the hole she’d dug and smoothed the black dirt over it. The huntsman, again, did not answer. She stood up and brushed her hands on her skirt. She walked over to the stone and looked into the bowl. Her dirty fingers hovered above the water but did not touch it.

“Everything dies,” she whispered, and the huntsman wasn’t sure if she was talking to him anymore. “The land where I used to live, the people who were _mine_ , they’re gone now. _He_ took me from them, and they perished or dispersed and I could not stop it,” She touched the water then with the tip of a finger and touched that finger, too, to her tongue. Light glowed golden from the bowl and the huntsman thought he could smell salt, and then the light faded to pale grey, the color of fog and rain, and the salt smell faded. The huntsman walked over to the bowl – a scrying glass, he thought. Children used to play games like this with their pretend magic, with their make-believe, when it was not so cold that water froze wherever it was poured. He looked inside and saw a great tower by the sea, much like this one.

"It is not like this one," the queen snapped. He looked again. Brown and black vines had crawled over the tower, now, and it was being battered by a slate sea.

“What about these people?” he asked the queen. His voice was hollow. There was no force behind his words. He was no longer alive; he didn’t much care anymore for the living.

“ _These_ people,” the queen sneered. “What are these people to me? I keep the fire in the Great Hall burning for them, don't I? And everything dies,” she added softly, insistently. A crease had appeared on her smooth brow. She looked down again into the water and snatched her hand away, spinning to walk toward her flowers, her fingertips brushing their petals, seeking comfort.

“Not you, though,” she said suddenly. The huntsman studied her fingertips as they brushed against the stamen of a lily. It stained them with red dust, like rust or blood at the edge of an old knife long unused.

“As long as Snow White lives, you will be bound to her,” she said. “You will never see your Penny again.”

“Dead or not, I’ll never see her again.” She could not tempt him with promises of some afterlife, some joyful reunion, the huntsman thought. Penny was gone. He did not believe she was waiting for him anywhere. Her heart had stopped and she’d grown cold and he had buried her. That’s what happened when you died, he thought. Generally.

The queen frowned at him, her eyes momentarily soft and sad. Then her lips tightened and turn downwards into a scowl. “Snow White is not like any other princess. She was not born, so she cannot die. You will continue on forever by her side, without stopping, without rest. She is a spell that must be undone.”

The huntsman shuddered this time, heart or no heart.

“Bring her to me. Do not fail this time. I will see to it that she is destroyed.”

The queen fondled the lily and bent to smell it, pressing her lips against the center of the flower. When she straightened, the red was smeared across her face and the huntsman thought of her teeth against his heart.

“Then we all can rest,” she said.

 


	6. Snow White in the Forest

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There was no warmth in her and her blood was frozen in her veins.

Snow White found a cottage in the woods to watch when the moon was out. It was filled with seven little men, and in the morning, at the exact moment when time shifted imperceptibly from night time to the beginning of dawn, they left the house in single file. They carried shovels over their shoulders and pushed songs up from their lungs to their lips and into the cold air before them. She stole into their cottage, then, and sat at their table, picking at the crumbs they left from their breakfast, scraping the oatmeal from the bottom of the pot (just barely warm), munching at the brown apples and at their seeds, dipping her fingers into the fresh thick honey that they harvested straight from the hives and dribbling it into her mouth (this warmed her more than a fire would), putting up another kettle to boil and making herself a pot of the earthy tea they liked to drink, made from bark and from roots and dandelion heads.

The huntsman hadn’t returned; he’d been with the queen for days. Snow White was unconcerned, however. Her face was sticky and sweet and she couldn’t stop licking her lips. The cottage was warm even though the men had put out the fire before leaving, and she wandered from the room that doubled as kitchen and dining room and into the room that housed all of the beds. They were all nearly identical, except for the quilts that are folded neatly at the foot of each. Brown, blue, green, red, eggplant purple, potato skin, and grey. On the first day that the huntsman was gone, she slept in the brown bed, and would sleep in each one in turn until he came back. She switched the quilts, too, when she got bored, and when the men returned, she peeked through the window to watch them bicker, all of them blaming the littlest for the prank. He went and sat in a corner to sulk and Snow White smiled a mischievous smile and wandered away in the cold night, feeling nothing, not cold, not sadness, not fear, and, in turn, wanting nothing.   


She ran from the tower because the little girl slipped her a hairpin and it seemed like the only thing to do. She wondered now what would have happened to her if she had stayed. Would the queen have kept her locked up there forever? Would she have melted her down into all her components – evaporate her snow in the face of high heat, boil her blood, make it sizzle and vanish as the feathers of her hair shrivelled and were carried away, little more than dust lost amidst the winter winds? For surely the queen would have burned her eventually. Or would the queen’s subjects have finally revolted, stormed the tower, breaking her out of the dungeons, deposing the queen and disposing of her, and raising Snow White in her stead?    


She walked to the river and thought of these things. It was a short walk, and when she arrived there, she stopped. She was glad to be out of the dungeon and safe within the forest; she was glad, she supposed, that she wasn’t dead. But she was not quite the people who told stories about her, either, Snow White thought. They were thin and hungry, their faces were dirty, the fingers of their hands were curled and grasping, and their eyes shone bright with fever and madness, and it would not be long before they tore down the tower to get to their queen, not because she was a particularly unjust ruler – the queen, at least, kept the fires roaring for them, although she did not give them what they truly wanted, which was food and the warmth to grow it – but because they were hungry, they were bored, they were weary of winter, and perhaps a witch’s blood could break the spell on the land.   


It won’t, Snow thinks, suddenly quite sure that the queen’s death, if that is what the people hope for, wouldn’t change a thing.   


Still, Snow White was not terribly concerned about the fate of the people who freed her. She was not like them, after all – she did not shiver in the cold, her lungs did not swell with ice and phlegm, her lips never changed from their blood red hue. She walked around the house of the little men with her feet bare in the snow and her skirt in tatters and remained unfazed, and wondered, lazily, why the people did not seem to think  she  was a witch. She wondered about the queen who was her mother – why did they hate her so and revere Snow White? Was it because the queen came from a realm by the sea? Because she had known spring time, and summer, and autumn, and because winter in the kingdom she had left behind did not steal the lives of children and leave their bodies uncovered on the side of frozen, muddied roads? Was it because they had never known summer, or spring, only winter - although perhaps the oldest among them remembered the occasional respite from winter, when perhaps a few potatoes or a turnip could be dug from the ground to thicken gruel and soups made of rats and other vermin? Or was it simply because the queen was a foreigner? Or because she had power that she refused to use?

Snow White didn’t know what they had hoped for when they freed her. Perhaps the little girl just wanted to be near a princess. Perhaps they thought there was a spell set around her tiny cell, and that once they freed her, she would be able to overtake the queen, to break the winter from the land. But that was foolish. They must have forgotten what she was made of, their darling princess, the beloved daughter of their noble king. If they could forget the king who neglected them, who held feasts in his hall and kept the castle warm but never let a single peasant’s foot cross the threshold, not even the blackened frozen feet of children – if they could forget their cruel king and more, if they could sing him songs…then surely they had forgotten for what Snow had been named. There was no warmth in her and her blood was frozen in her veins.   
  
  



	7. Once taste ambrosia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I like the taste of honey,” she repeated, “and I do not want to die.”

She was sitting by the river when the huntsman returned, her arms bare, her skin indistinguishable from the frozen forest, her hair the same color as the blasted trees. Her back was to him and she was still.

“She did not believe you,” she said, and it struck the huntsman that this is the first time he had heard the girl’s voice. It was hoarse and low and not at all like the sweet singing voices of princesses in stories. He wondered if Snow White had ever spoken aloud before, or if until this moment she had been mute. He preferred it this way, he decided. He didn’t like hearing her voice when she spoke inside his head. The way was strange. It was as if her thoughts became his own, and he disappeared somewhere while she was speaking, taking up space in the hollow that had once held his heart. When she had first spoken to him – _would you die for me_ – it made him feel as empty as the first moment she had cut out his heart and held it before him.

“No,” the huntsman said.

“She will hunt me.” The girl did not sound afraid. She turned around to look at him. Her skin was as smooth as the queen’s and she too looked as if she were made of stone. “Did you come here to bring me to her, huntsman? Did you come to try again?”

The huntsman did not answer.

“No,” Snow White said softly, turning back to the river.

For reasons he couldn’t quite understand, the huntsman moved to stand next to the girl, and then to sit beside her. He took off his boots and dangled his feet in the rushing of the river. The water should have felt cold, but instead it felt no different from the rest of him.

“Where will you go, Snow White?” he asked.

She was quiet for a long time. He kicked his feet in the water and she copied his movements. Her feet were as pale as fish and as delicate. His skin was two toned and lighter where the water had washed away the grime.

“I suppose I could stay in the forest,” Snow White said.

“She’ll find you.”

“And what will she do?” Her voice was tight and angry. “She made me, and now she wants to unmake me, like I am some spell that needs to be undone.”

“You are.”

The girl made a sound like a snarl. She pressed her hands against the hard earth and pushed herself up and away from him.

“I’m sorry, _princess_ ,” the huntsman said, looking up at her with a twisted, mirthless smile. “But that is precisely what the queen said. You are a spell she was tricked into granting. You are made of cold and terrible things. And when you are gone, winter will leave this land.”

“And if I leave?”

“She’ll follow.”

Snow White paced anxiously back and forth. If he’d had a heart, the huntsman thought, if this girl, mad and dangerous and looking for all the world now like a young thing caught in a trap, had not cut his heart out, he might have pitied her. He might even pity her now, though he was heartless; she seemed so fragile in her tattered dress. When he stood, she froze and glared at him. He found that he preferred her that way.

“Honey,” she said. The huntsman blinked. “Honey! The little men in the cottage, they leave each morning, whistling,” she said angrily. “They go…wherever it is that little men go, with their pick axes and their shovels. Perhaps they dig. Perhaps they build things. I don’t know, and I don’t care. But while you were gone, I’ve spent the days in their little house. They leave out their breakfast, the cool dregs of their tea, soft oats, and dried fruit, and honey.”

The huntsman remained impassive. He never thought he would hear the girl speak so many words. He was not sure what she was trying to tell him.

“I like the taste of honey,” she said quietly. “I like the tea they drink, it smells like…wildflowers.” She looked thoughtful; her brow furrowed ever so slightly, her little red tongue sticking out to touch the side of her mouth. “I don’t think I’ve ever smelled wildflowers, but I know that’s what the tea was made from, the same way I know that blood tastes of iron, and fear, and love, the way snow tastes of evergreen and pine and sleeping, and the queen of apples and sorrow and sea, and your heart of sweat, and meat, and Penny, always of Penny -”

“Stop.”

“Who is Penny?”

The huntsman grabbed Snow White by the arms. She looked up at him with wide dark eyes, curious and unafraid. He squeezed and she twisted out of his grasp and left behind a burning, like snow on bare skin, melting. She watched him, wary but unthreatened.

The huntsman felt nothing, nothing, at the mention of Penny’s name. It tumbled carelessly out of the girl’s mouth; he did not know how she could possibly know it. He felt the same creeping sensation that he had in the queen’s garden, the undeniable, unsettling trace of magic. But that was all. He knew, logically, that what he should have felt was sorrow and rage. He should have wanted to weep. He should have wanted to grab the girl before him and hurt her, or seek comfort in her. (But her small, frail body would be too unfamiliar, too unlike Penny’s, and besides, she was cold and remote, a magic thing, not real.)

“What have you done to me?”

Snow White just looked confused. “I asked - ”

 _“Don’t say her name!”_ The huntsman couldn’t bear to hear his wife’s name and to feel…nothing. He watched Snow White angrily, hating her more than he had ever hated anyone, even the king, even the queen. She had cut out his heart and now he could not mourn his wife and he could not die.

She met his eyes, quiet and still; not even her hair moved in the wind. She looked unbearably sad, lonely, and yet still remote, untouchable, and strange.

“I like the taste of honey,” she said. “And oats, and apples, and I like the chill of the river on my feet, and the sound of the little men whistling, and the warmth of their quilts in their little beds, and the way they bicker when they come home to find I’ve rearranged them.”

She didn’t drop her gaze from his. He thought he could see her shiver.

“I like the taste of honey,” she repeated, “and I do not want to die.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Then for nine days divine Deo roamed over the earth,  
> holding torches ablaze in her hands;  
> in her grief she did not once taste ambrosia  
> or nectar sweet-to-drink, nor bathed her skin."
> 
> The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, lines 47-50
> 
> (I realize this story is kind of backwards and inverted and not at all like Persephone and Demeter, really...but, well, I love that myth to pieces. So...bear with me, I suppose.)


	8. The fairest.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ...she could hear the voices of the people shouting in the cold for their princess; they thought the queen had killed her, there were rumors that she had skinned Snow White and roasted her, had picked her teeth with the bones of the girl’s fingers...They were calling for Snow White. They called her _the fairest one of all..._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for this chapter: Mild non-con (nothing graphic, but trigger warning all the same.)

In the garden there were two mirrors. The first was the scry glass, filled with water that remained still but for the rain, which seeped in through holes in the roof and cascaded town, licking the leaves of her apple trees as they fell, and untouched by human hands. It was thrice blessed water – once from the sky that sent it, then from the leaves that led it to the queen, who blessed it one last time with her spells before pouring it into the glass. It showed her many things, but they were all things of the past: her city by the sea as it had been before the king had carried her away - that was the most painful sight the mirror could bestow. It showed her also the huntsman’s late robust wife. The queen watched idly the swell of the tall woman’s breast, the heat in her eyes as she greeted her husband, the way they had used to crash together like bears. The fool young thing had been hearty, and healthy, and simple, and strong. The queen shuddered with something as sharp as lust and as dull as envy and she sent these images in dreams along to the huntsman and thought she could feel his heart beat again, and quickly, beneath the dirt where she had buried it.

She remembered the king when he had been her lover and felt her own heart wither and stop for moments at a time in her chest.

The other mirror in the garden the queen had crafted herself, and it had imbibed some of her magic during the process.. She stood before it now and saw herself, tall, stately, but with wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and across her forehead. She and Snow White looked as if they had been carved of stone; that is what the huntsman thought when he was near her. And yet looking upon herself now she thought she was an old thing, and frail, and she wondered, now that Snow White had escaped, a loose spell, a spell with a will of its own, if the girl was drawing her power from her. She had never noticed her age before. Now, between the two mirrors, she thought she could see the girl she had been, fair and slight, whip-like as a willow branch, and the crone she was becoming. It had been three weeks since the huntsman departed for the forest. The queen did not truly believe that he would return with the girl – Snow White had cut out his heart, after all, had held it in her hands. She had a strange power, wild and untaught and all her own. The huntsman would not betray her.

The queen had hoped, though, perhaps foolishly. Still, she knew – had known for a long time – that no one could undo a spell but the spellcaster. Others perhaps might break it; the queen wondered what could break the spell that was Snow White. What would the girl become, for example, at true love’s first kiss, a tried-and-true method of spell-breaking? The king had wanted a daughter, something fair and lovely and his to own, a pretty toy. What would happen to Snow White if the spell that created her was broken? By love? By luck? By an alignment of stars as happenstance and predictable as fate? By the girl’s own will and the queen’s waning power?

The queen couldn’t say, and the possibilities, she thought, were too dangerous to be allowed. She remembered the king, the coldness of his eyes, the heavy weight of his tongue on her flesh, like a dead thing, the way his hands pawed at silk of her gowns and ripped at her clothes so that the buttons, so carefully sewn, popped and rolled away into the darkness. She remembered how he dressed himself in furs and went for drives along the countryside to laugh at the suffering of his people. “The lazy fools,” he had growled to her disdainfully when he returned, crawling over her pale body in the firelight, pulling the thin fabric of her shift aside and biting her shoulder. “They don’t even know how start a fire,” he sneered. “Let them die, I say. I do not suffer fools in this kingdom.” And the queen had said nothing of his contempt, or the fact that the forest was blasted and damp, and the earth frozen through so that nothing there could grow.

The queen shuddered again and shook herself, and the girl in the mirror, superimposed over the queen’s own current reflection, shivered. “Poor child,” the queen said softly, turning away from the mirror to pick an apple from the tree that was growing over the huntsman’s heart. Out of the corner of her it, it seemed that her young reflection wept. Down below, she could hear the voices of the people shouting in the cold for their princess; they thought the queen had killed her, there were rumors that she had skinned Snow White and roasted her, had picked her teeth with the bones of the girl’s fingers. Still the queen kept the fires burning for them to give them a warm place to sleep at night. This only seemed to anger them further, and she watched them wearily from her window. They were calling for Snow White. The called her _the fairest one of all,_ their rightful, long-suffering, true-born queen.

The witch queen skinned the apple in one long curling strip of red and placed the skin on the windowsill. She turned back to her reflection. The pale slip of a girl, hardly more than a child, showed on her face the fear the queen supposed she herself must have felt at the roar of the crowd below. “Don’t worry, dearest,” the queen murmured, biting into the apple. It tasted of the huntsman’s heart. “We will find her. We will take her apart and it will be as if the spell was never cast. And then we shall return home and live by the sea, alone.”

The girl offered a wavering smile as the queen stood before her.

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall,” the queen commanded. “Show me the fairest.”


	9. Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "You are the only other person I've spoken to, huntsman, did you know that?" she said after a moment, spinning around and holding one pale foot out before her. She was graceful on the log, and light, and utterly unafraid of falling onto or through the ice below. "And you are not so much of a wonderful conversationalist," she mused. "I wish to meet more people."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title of this chapter comes from Keats' "Ode on Melancholy."
> 
>  
> 
> _"Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,_  
>  _Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,_  
>  _And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes."_  
> 

"Why not?" Snow White asked. She was balanced on a rotten log that stretched over the river, her arms held out gracefully on either side of her. Her bare toes wriggled on the sodden bark and she looked over her shoulder at the huntsman, who lowered his bow and sighed at her. 

"Because," he said gruffly. "There are seven of them and only one of me. What should I do if they wanted to keep you? You would be trading one cage for another."

"Quite a nice cage, though, and with plenty of company," Snow White said thoughtfully. "Dry and warm, not at all dank like the one the queen kept me in. And they seem so pleasant - they eat toasted apples and oats with cream and honey -"

"Enough with the bloody honey!"

"And their quilts are warm and smell slept-in and cozy. I think I would be quite happy with them," Snow White went on, ignoring him. She looked up at the sky, which was pale grey and unrelenting in its dreariness, and spun on one leg to face the huntsman.  


"Their cottage is still too close to the queen's lands, anyway, little witchgirl," he said. "Best to get you out of this forest - or at least deeper in, where her spies cannot reach you."

"Oh, spies," Snow White said loftily. "I suppose you're talking about the bats and the birds and the foxes. They have better things to do than spy on me, huntsman. They have food to forage and nests to maintain and predators to avoid. What would they want with me?"

"They are loyal to the queen and her magic."

"And what of my magic?"

"What of it?" the huntsman snapped. "What magic have you?"

Snow White frowned at him. "You are still standing because of my magic. Or have you forgotten who cut out your heart?"

"The queen holds my heart now, girl," the huntsman warned. "I should carry you back to her right now, and let her do with or undo you as she will."

"Perhaps you should," Snow White said grimly. "But you wont, because you can't."

The hunstman did not reply. She was right about that at least, damn her.

"You are the only other person I've spoken to, huntsman, did you know that?" she said after a moment, spinning around and holding one pale foot out before her. She was graceful on the log, and light, and utterly unafraid of falling onto or through the ice below. "And you are not so much of a wonderful conversationalist," she mused. "I wish to meet more people." She sat on the log and kicked her feet beneath her, the tattered edges of her skirt swaying with the motion. 

"Why?"

"Perhaps I should like to live among them. To meet and marry a husband - a blacksmith, maybe, or a butcher. I would cook and raise children and leave the queen to her frozen realm, and then she would no longer hunt me."

"You can't do that," the huntsman said. Snow White walked quickly toward the side of the river where he waited, his arms crossed. She leapt down lightly from the tree trunk bridge and glared up into his face.

"Why not?" 

"Look at you," the huntsman said, grasping her upper arm and pressing down on her back so that she bent over the river. She studied her own reflectiong in the ice - hair the color of soot and pitch, her slender pale face shocking by contrast, her lips bright as apples and beestings. She pulled away and glared at the huntsman again.

"What's wrong with my face? Am I not lovely? The townspeople all said I'm lovely, their beautiful, rightful queen. I heard them shouting it from my tower." Snow White sounded as petulant as a child.

"No butcher or baker or blacksmith would have you," the huntsman said wearily. "You would be wed to a prince or a king as soon as you stepped from this blasted forest, even dressed as you are in rags, and then the queen would go to war to shed your blood, girl." He slung his bow - freshly and crudely hewn - over his shoulder and rubbed at his face with large, cold hands. "Better to stay here, out of sight and safe. If you're lucky, perhaps she'll forget about you."

"Then you can marry me," Snow White said suddenly. "We can build a cottage of our own. I will learn to sew, and to garden, and to cook, and to give you children -"

"No," the huntsman interrupted.

"Why not?" Snow White shouted, clenching her hands into fists.

"Because I am dead, for one, little girl, and for another, I do not wish to marry you, strange little spell-child that you are."

"Then what sort of life is this?" Snow White hissed, turning away from him and darting, quick as a bird, across the bridge. The huntsman swore and clamoured after her. "At least in my tower there was no hope of change. There was the moon at night, bright and full, or slivered, or hiding, and that was enough, though lonely. Now I am here, and there is honey, and fruit, and quilts and pie, and seven strange little men who sing in the morning and sing in the evening, and there are people not too far from here, many people, and you keep me trapped in this forest, away and alone, always alone, from all of them. What am I for, then, huntsman? I was not born and I will not die, and you do not let me live, either! I am a spell with no purpose since my father, the king, died -" She spun around so quickly that the huntsman slipped from the tree trunk and landed hard on the ice below. His breath, such as it was, was knocked from his static lungs. Snow White landed neatly beside him, her feet bare on the ice. She peered down at him, frowning, but her face was smooth and dry. "And while he lived I was only there to be looked at by him. What am I here for, huntsman?" she repeated.

The huntsman sat up with a groan. She continued staring at him as he heaved himself to his feet. Her eyes were wide and dark on his face, and not a little lost. The huntsman felt himself pitying her, strange, lost thing. He wondered if it might be more charitable to bring her to the queen, to have the spell undone; that, he thought, might be best for both of them. Snow White shuttered and clenched her jaw, and he knew that she would not let him take her back there. 

"I do not know what you are here for, spell-child," he said, as gently as he could muster. Snow White exhaled and seemed to shrink. She stared worriedly over his shoulder into the grey and black of the forest. She turned to look longingly at the cottage of the seven little men, just visible through the trees. "Come," said the huntsman, hoisting himself up onto the river bed and pulling Snow White up after him. "Let's find a place to stay, tonight. Someplace warm," he added, although the girl did not look cold. "I will find us something for dinner. Tomorrow we can discuss where it is we should go."


	10. The hollowed tree's song

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It was difficult for her to tell the difference between sleeping and waking when she was alone.

The huntsman was as good as his word. He found a place for them to stay in the hollowed out belly of a tree, surrounded by low hanging branches. There it was quieter even than the still forest, which seemed to watch them with baited breath. Snow White looked about as he led held back the willow's curtain for her. She did not feel afraid, even though she felt that the huntsman was right: the forest was spying on them. She felt just as sure, however, that the creatures here would not betray her. And if they did, well. Her feet were swift and she did not tire easily, and there was always the huntman, with his axe, and his arrows, should the queen send another to collect her.

"In," the huntman grunted, jerking his chin toward the hollow. Snow White drifted passed him, and he stiffened in surprise as if expecting her to refuse. She ducked her head and sat in the center of the tree, her legs crossed, her back straight. The tree was wide enough for two, although she did not think the huntsman would join her there. It was about as big as the cell that queen had kept her in, but warmer, and darker, being windowless. It seemed the walls were breathing, humming, connected by the roots deep in the earth and made of a magic more ancient than the queen's magic, and stranger than the spell that animated Snow White. She blinked slowly and dug her fingers into the soil which, despite the cold, was soft and pliant under her fingers. She looked up at the huntsman, who was watching her curiously. When he saw she was looking, his expression shifted into careful neutrality.

"Do you eat?" he asked.

"Not much, out of habit," Snow White said, rubbing the dirt from her palms onto the backs of her hands. "I wasn't fed much in the tower. But I do not think I was ever very hungry, despite that," she mused. She wanted to wriggle into the earth and lay humming beneath the tree, joining it in whatever ceaseless song it was singing. Here, she thought, she would be safe; here, the queen would not find her. "Do you?" she asked slowly, looking up at the huntsman.  


He was silent for a long moment and pressed one hand over his stomach. "I feel hollow," he observed, and when he met her eyes, his own were hard. Ah, Snow thought. He still had not forgiven her for taking his heart. Perhaps he never would - and yet, he could never leave. A strange friendship they would have, then. She tilted her head a little, saying nothing, and he clenched his jaw. "I cannot tell if it is hunger, or if it is..." He pursed his lips and turned to go.

"You are like me now," Snow White said, mostly to herself. The huntsman stilled, nearly turned back around. Snow White stretched her legs out before her and dug her toes into the dirt as well as her fingers. She lay down and spread her arms out beside her, arched her back into the warm earth. She sighed and became still. She could feel the dirt milling about beneath her, the busy movement of things that lived beneath it, burrowing, tunneling, moles and grubs and sleeping insects. They did not frighten her or make her skin crawl. She closed her eyes and imagined herself among them. She did not stir at the whisper of the branches as the huntsman took his leave.

She might have slept. It was difficult for her to tell the difference between sleeping and waking when she was alone. When the huntsman was with her, she knew she was awake; in her dreams she was always alone. When the huntsman left, who could tell? She may have just been laying there, breathing in the same rhythm with which the wind slipped, now teasing, now tentative, through the branches of the hollow tree, as she silently implored the busy little creatures to subsume her into the earth. Humans feared and hated burials; this she knew from observing from the top of her tower. They greeted burials with black clothes and wailing; mothers tore at their hair and faces, fathers howled and cursed. And yet sometimes their dead were buried quite unceremoniously. She knew, for example, that one of the elements of the spell which created her was the blood of her father's subjects, frozen dark upon the snow, the bodies piled high and stiff in mid-winter. He had sneered at them. Others had walked by with their fingers crossed and their breath held, their eyes sliding, embarrassed, over the open plot of ground. 

She crossed her arms over her chest, her palms curling over her shoulders, and wondered if the huntsman had buried his wife, if he had visited the grave, if he had howled and fought and steeped himself in drink. Penny had been the wife's name. Penny, bright and copper-sun-shining, hot and loud as a forge, tasting of blood and salt. Snow shifted her shoulders. She wondered where Penny had gone and whether the huntsman would one day follow. She rather hoped not. Although he was gruff, although he grunted, and growled at her, although he even, it seemed, hated her, or at the very least was suspicious of her and disdained her, it was pleasant, Snow thought, to have company, begrudging though it was. In the tower there had been no one until the little girl had given her the means to escape. There had been the rats, of course, that shared her cell, but they were not very good company, and often as not, she ate them.

She may have dreamt.

While she dreamt, the humming of the tree formed words. It called her by her name, and by all the huntsman's names for her, _child_ and _witchgirl_ , and other names he called her when he though she was out of earshot. It asked her who she was and what she wanted. Snow White opened her mouth to answer, exhaled, pressed her lips together tightly, and that alone, it seemed, was answer enough. She felt the treesong humming in her skin; she felt as if the warmth of the earth were pulling her. She raised her head slightly, blinking the haze out of her eyes, to check to see if the creatures were indeed bringing her down with them. Her skin shone bright in the muted chamber, and still she lay above the ground. She closed her eyes and returned to the dream. The song took her out into the forest, to where the huntsman stalked a young buck. She flew along the shaft of the loosened arrow. She struck the creature in the heart and felt the dull panic of the beast as its hearts' blood made a bid for open air. The song then took her high above the tree tops. She could see the listless smoke of the queen's town, the crumbling grey ruin of her castle. And finally the song took her back down, to the river and beneath it, to a place that was cool and dank. It was almost like her cell in the tower, and Snow White would have shuddered, but for the fact that it was also pure, and clean, and as magic as the treesong itself.

When she was returned to the hollow, the huntsman making his way back with the body of the young buck strewn over his shoulder. He had gathered dry sticks for firewood and tied neatly; they dangled from one finger. Snow White was deposited into her body where, still and silent as the unburied dead, she slept on.


	11. Hart's Blood

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Penny used to make a hart's blood stew, with parsnip and potatoes and cloves, back when there had been food to eat and hearths roaring with fires. She always took the first bite of the heart herself; she said it made her "am'russ." She would strip him just as swiftly as a fallen deer and push him on the floor before the fire; she would cover him in her smoke dark curls until their home was filled with their howling, lustful cries.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter gets a little descriptive in terms of field dressing a deer, so if that squicks you, maybe skip this one?

She was still lying prone on the ground when the huntsman returned. He bent his knees to place the bundle of firewood on the ground and let the buck slip carefully down beside it. He stood watching the girl, who was still and quiet, her arms folded over her chest, her small fingers curled delicately over the cups of her shoulders. She looked like a statue carved for a mausoleum. He wondered, briefly, if she were dead - if, in the short time that he'd left her alone, the queen had stolen into the forest and succeeded in undoing the spell that had created Snow White. He walked over to her, his boots shuffling quietly in the soft, damp earth, and knelt beside her. He bent to listen for the sound of her breath, and couldn't find it. With her arms folded, he couldn't press a palm to feel for a heartbeat. He pulled his knife from its sheath and held it under her nose, and she opened her eyes and regarded him steadily, looking none too surprised at the blade, and not at all threatened.

"I thought you were dead," the huntsman said flatly, leaning back and sheathing the knife again.

"Were you going to kiss me awake, huntsman?" Her voice was wry. She might have been teasing him.

"No kiss of mine could wake you, princess." 

She sighed and sat up, shaking the dirt from her hair. "I was dreaming," she said, pushing herself to her feet and holding out one small, pale hand to him. He pushed his own palms against his knees and stood without her aid, and she strode from the hollow to stare down at the dead buck. "I followed you," she told him, and the huntsman wasn't sure if she was speaking to him or to the animal. "I saw you track this beast, I flew with the loosed arrow into its heart..."

The huntsman grunted. "You rather like doing that, don't you," he said dismissively, and the girl glared at him. "Make yourself useful." He nodded toward the buck's head. "Hold its legs up while I skin the beast."

Snow White, uncomplaining, did as was asked of her. The huntsman felt slightly unnerved by the attention she paid him as he worked, cutting the neck and stomach, pulling the hide down quickly, lashing, as necessary, through the membraneous film that coated the muscles. He felt her eyes on him and looked up, impressed against his will at how stoic the girl was. For such a small slip of a thing, she had a stomach of steel, he thought - but perhaps it was just that she was not a proper girl, not a proper mortal at all, most likely, and the huntsman felt his skin creep and shudder, clammy in the still cold. Not even Penny had been able to look at a stripped carcass without a grimace twisting her lips.

"Next time you will teach me how," Snow White said, releasing the beast's legs and lifting its lolling head into her lap. She viewed the face calmly, running a fingertip over the long lashes, slipping her thumb along the feather-soft shell of its ear. She closed the buck's eyes respectfully and stared, mute, as the huntsman cut the buck from sternum to groin, opening the body to let the insides cool. She watched with interest as he removed the pink and spongy lungs and plucked the heart of the buck and held it up. The huntsman surveyed it with distaste, Snow White with open fascination. "It looks like your heart," she said. Her eyes were dark and wide on the blood as it dripped from the huntsman's hands. The huntsman shuddered again and placed the steaming heart on the ground beside him. Penny used to make a hart's blood stew, with parsnip and potatoes and cloves, back when there had been food to eat and hearths roaring with fires. She always took the first bite of the heart herself; she said it made her "am'russ." She would strip him just as swiftly as a fallen deer and push him on the floor before the fire; she would cover him in her smoke dark curls until their home was filled with their howling, lustful cries. 

The thought turned his stomach now and it felt as if something was echoing in the empty cavity of his chest - like a heavy book dropped carelessly down a tall flight of stairs, like the last resounding clang of Penny's hammer at the forge. The huntsman was surprised to feel so sensitive to them still, these memories; he was as good as dead now, after all. Still, he recoiled from the buck's heart; he would bury it, he decided, as the queen had buried his.   
Snow White was watching him knowingly, a small smile on her red lips. The huntsman would have snarled something at her - something rude, something threatening, something she would, most likely, completely ignore - but she sprang up suddenly and darted away. He thought of following her and decided against it. Let the fool girl go where she would. He stood and sheared a handful of the closest branches, clucking his tongue in a reluctant apology as the tree shivered indignantly. With the branches he wove a mat upon which he placed the meat to cook later. Then he gathered up the remains carefully and stalked off to bury them far from camp. 

When he returned, the neat bundle of firewood was untied and scattered, and the meat and woven mat were both gone. The huntsman cursed and spun about in a rage, but Snow White ducked through the branches with her arms laden and traces of blood down the front of her filthy dress. "I tried to start the fire for you," she explained, shrugging. The huntsman stared; she seemed, in this moment, almost an ordinary girl as she struggled to balance the dark, glistening venison. "I do not know how. You will have to teach me that, too." She glanced pointedly at the firewood, and he gathered it up, speechless. "There is a dry patch of grass a few paces apart from the river," she told him. "I think it would make a good place for the fire." 

"Show me," the huntsman said, following her out.

She placed the meat on the ground and watched him as he fiddled with the fire. From the pocket of her dress she pulled a sprig of rosemary; from her other pocket, a small pouch tied with a worn looking string. 

"Where did you get that?" the huntman said sharply. Snow White stared down consideringly at the meat, which she must have cleaned in the cold river water. She open the pouch and poured its contents into the palm of her hand and the scent of spices wafted up to the huntsman. His stomach growled and his mouth watered - who knew that dead men could hunger? - but he glared at the girl. "Where?" he prompted.

"I stole it," she said, shrugging again. "From the little men and their garden." 

The huntsman looked around the forest, which was beginning to darken. Surely they would have been back by now from whereever it was they went during the day. He gritted his teeth.

"Did they see you?" he asked, struggling to sound calm.

"Oh, of course they did," she said airly. "It is hard to avoid seven pairs of wary eyes. But they could never catch me and they hardly believe I'm real."

"More fool you, then," he snapped. "They'll be after us. Dwarves don't suffer thieves." 

He had never seen Snow White look so much like a haughty princess and so little like an eerie witchgirl. She stood and brushed her hands on her skirt and glared down at him. "Then we shall invite them to a feast," she said, curtseying sardonically, "and thank them for their contribution."

The huntsman snorted and took the stick she offered him, spearing a piece of meat and holding it over the fire. It crackled and dripped in the heat, and Snow White found a stick of her own and followed suit. She sat and leaned against him, a small pressure against his shoulder, and, too weary of her strangeness to push her away, the huntsman let her.


	12. the growth of frozen, interrupted hands

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Snow White would be the death of the kingdom that loved her so well.

She couldn't sleep. 

The little plot of ground where she had buried the huntsman's heart was always rumbling, as if she'd buried a drum beneath the soil. It kept her awake at night and reminded her that somewhere, the girl was out there, untouchable and with a magic to rival the queen's own. To make matters worse, that magic was starting to take root in her very garden! Something, _something_ was starting to sprout where the huntsman's heart yet beat, too small to be seen but undeniably there, growing and thriving as insistently as the little girl who had created it. 

The queen felt old. She squinted when she looked down at the crowds below the tower; she squinted when she looked into the corner where the huntsman's heart was buried. Something pale and delicate trembled there, though whether it was a flower or a weed, only time would tell. The queen could not bring herself to uproot it; a witch did not meddle with the spells of others, after all.

The people still called for their princess. Snow White, they called her. They chanted her name. The queen had given them firewood for warmth, and a place to sleep during the coldest nights. She had given them what food she could, but to them she was still a foreign and evil queen, a witch of considerable and suspicious power. She would not mock them, though heaven knew she had the right. How little they knew, she thought bitterly, those fools below who clung to a false memory of a just king and a sweet queen, and a little girl born of their pure and courtly love and banished by the cold and jealous heart of their usurper. They did not know that the king, with his avarice and callousness, had brought the endless winter into the kingdom. They did not know that his daughter, the child of a careless spell that she, the queen, had been tricked into granting - that as long as the child lived and breathed, the ice and sickness and starvation would plague them. Snow White would be the death of the kingdom that loved her so well. 

Or perhaps they did know, and could not bear it. The queen could not begrudge them that. She too, after all, knew what it was like to willfully ignore that which was too painful to acknowledge. Had she not closed her eyes and vanished each time the king pawed at her with dirt under his fingernails? Had she not surpressed a shudder at the touch of his chapped lips scratching against her neck, her breast? Had she not smiled at him, and glittered in the gem-encrusted dresses he'd lavished on her, the furs and feathers he'd had commissioned; had she not simpered, and curtsied, and thought instead of her bone white tower by the sea; had she not remembered, so vividly, her home and her people, their fingers smelling of apples and butter, their hair smelling of sand and salt - that the king, an altogether vile, cruel, frivolous man, had tricked her into granting him the one wish that could bind her here? And even after his death, which she'd brought about with her own hands, her own knives, her own will, still, she languished in this, her kingdom and her prison, dreaming, dreaming of one day returning to the land that had forgotten her.

No, she thought, she did not resent them their little omissions and edits, nor being cast the villain in their tale.

The queen wondered often why she did not just leave them to it - who, after all, were these people to her? They were not her people. Her people had long since scattered without their queen to keep the summer city flourishing, regulating the rain and the sun, keeping the storms at bay in her tower that overlooked the sea. Why, the queen thought, did she not just leave? But she couldn't. Snow White was her strongest and most destructive spell, and she was as bound to this kingdom as the girl was, though Snow White herself perhaps did not know it. The queen wanted more than anything to leave, but she could not. And Snow White, it seemed, was in no mood to hurry back. And so, the queen decided, I will seek her.

But her bones felt old, though, for a witch, she was not very old, and her skin felt thin. She shivered in the cold that crept in through the stone, through the glass of her single window; even in the warmth of her garden, she shivered.

Not everyone loved Snow White with the passion of the dull-witted, stubborn masses. There were those who, just desperate enough, or tired enough, or cruel enough, could be whispered to or bought. But they would not dare ascend the tower, and so the queen would have to go to them.

She needed, first, a disguise, so she opened the window and forced herself to stand straight despite the biting chill. She collected three of the sharpest icicles that hung below her windowpane and shattered them, and mixed them with the darkest, oldest soil in the garden. She stripped naked and she rubbed the resulting cold paste all over her skin and into her hair. A raven, sensing magic and purpose, landed on her windowsill to watch her. He glared at her with one shining eye, condemning her for her spell, but she ignored him, and soon he flew away, leaving behind one single flight feather. This she burned, carefully, from both ends, letting the ashes fall into the scrying glass. The water there had always been pure, and now it was polluted with carrion feathers. The queen looked into her mirror, where the small blonde girl always sat, fretting and afraid. 

"Don't worry, sweet," the queen told the girl, who was her own reflection from ages ago, innocent and unspoiled, untouched by spells or grief or rage. A small, soft creature; helpless, the queen thought. Loathsome, she added, frowning at the girl, who flinched. "Soon, soon," the queen whispered. A tear slipped down the girl's cheek and in it's wake a pale, clean path; the girl's face, too, was muddied. "Soon we shall return home."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title of this chapter comes from Pablo Neruda's "The Way into Wood."
> 
> Here are the last two stanzas:
> 
> "I see the course of your petrified currents,  
> the growth of frozen, interrupted hands,  
> I hear your oceanic vegetations  
> rustling by night, enraged, intractable,  
> and I feel the leaves dying to the very core,  
> fusing their green materials  
> with your abandoned immobility.
> 
> Pores, veins, rings of sweetness,  
> weight, silent temperature,  
> arrows struck into your fallen soul,  
> beings asleep in your thick mouth,  
> shreds of sweet pulp devoured entirely,  
> ashes full of extinguished souls,  
> gather to me, to my limitless dream,  
> fall into my bed where the night falls  
> and fall without an end like broken water,  
> clasp me to your life, to your death,  
> to your submissive materials,  
> to your dead, neutralized doves,  
> and let us make fire, and silence, and sound,  
> and let us burn, and be hushed among bells."


End file.
